Lang Thompson wrote: > Something much harder to > evaluate would be a declining sense of "the frontier" but which certainly > can't be dismissed. And as for current Westerns, TNT has had a fair amount > of success with its string of Westerns. I dont know that genres are that static. Looking for the "Great American Western" of today seems akin to looking for the little boy I once knew in my adolescent. son. Some of the examples provided only seem to emphasize that fact--Unforgiven is a far cry from the "traditional" western as the genre originally came to be defined. The declining sense of the frontier is the result of the frontier being redefined, even in the TNT westerns mentioned above. A perfect example would be Purgatory (where the frontier is actually the line between the living and the dead). There's also been a turn away from the physical frontiers of cinema past, the wild west and the outer reaches of space, and towards the electronic frontiers (Johnny Mnemonic, Lawnmower Man, The Matrix--hey, I never said they were good...) and the psychological (Fight Club). Many of these new films share many elements with the "Great American Westerns" (The Matrix even had a final showdown, complete with tumbleweeds in the form of crumpled newspaper, and Fight Club ends in a bizarre perversion of the traditional gunfight), to include archetypal characters and the themes of civilization versus the wild (in some cases redefined as reality versus...unreality?). Again, I know this isnt exactly what the original writer was asking, but I think it does play an important role in tany discussion of the decline (or redefinition) of the western. Ed Owens ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite